Jasper Johns: The 100 Monotypes
Jasper Johns (b. 1930) is one of the leading artists of American Pop Art. In celebration of his ninetieth birthday, the Museum Barberini presented his most recent series.
When Jasper Johns began to move Abstract Expressionism back to figuration in the 1950s by painting familiar objects and signs like flags, numbers, targets, maps, and letters, the musician John Cage asked him, “Is it a flag, or is it a painting?” Johns’s blurring of the boundaries between reality and representation addresses the emergence of meaning with the help of collage, stencils, and printed repetition.
VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2020; Photo: David von Becker
Jasper Johns: The 100 Monotypes, 2015
VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2020; Photo: Henry Balaszeskul
Jasper Johns: The 100 Monotypes, 2015
“I like to repeat an image in another medium to observe the play between the two: the image and the medium. In a sense, one does the same thing two ways and observes differences and sameness—the stress the image takes in different media.”
Since each print is unique, monotypes are more akin to painting than to printmaking. Reworking the same plates many times for The 100 Monotypes, Johns added an etched imprint of his hand and symbols from the American Sign Language, as well as motifs that were important to him, including string, stencils, and allusions to his own paintings and sculptures. Each monotype informs the next, thus forming part of a narrative chain that reflects Johns’s artistic practice as well as his oeuvre. The 100 Monotypes is John’s most recent series that was created in conjunction with his catalogue raisonné (The Wildenstein Plattner Institute, 2017).
